


The Place that Made Him

by Pragnificent (PragmaticHominid)



Series: Falling Further [4]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Animal Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Hannibal Loves Will, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Post-Finale, Suicidal Thoughts, Will Loves Hannibal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-23 17:51:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9669602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PragmaticHominid/pseuds/Pragnificent
Summary: Three years after killing the Dragon, Will and Hannibal travel to Louisiana to retrace the landscape of Will's childhood, but neither of them expect to encounter remnants of Hannibal's own opaque history.AKA the "Hannibal and Will murder some neo-Nazis" fic.CW: This fic includes graphic depictions of emotional and physical violence, as well as reference to past suicide attempts and suicidal ideation.  Please mind the tags.





	1. Chapter 1

**I.**

It’s been strange for Will, coming back to a place that never really had been home and that certainly isn’t anymore.

The sense of alienation which began to hang about him even before their plane touched down at Louis Armstrong International only grew stronger after they picked up the rental car and left New Orleans behind for the long stretches of empty coastal roads and the small depressed towns that dotted the landscape.

There’s teeth to that feeling, but they aren’t especially sharp. It’s the simultaneous frustration and relief at finding himself locked out of something he never really wanted to own in the first place.    

Will had been afraid, mainly, that his current life would seem like some sort of lurid falsehood against the dull squalor of his past. And also, the part of Will that was always suspicious of being hurt worried that Hannibal would find cause for mockery in the landscape of his childhood.

But all along their slow trek across the coast Hannibal has found things of value, even some that Will might have missed on his own.

When Hannibal asked to come here it seemed only fair that he be given what he wanted. Will has seen his childhood haunts after all, has been allowed the opportunity to draw as much understanding as could be drawn from them.

Will understands how little he really understands of that. He came away from Hannibal’s ancestral home with strong emotional impressions but little else. Since then he’s caught glimpses of a lingering horror. When the nightmares are bad Hannibal sometimes talks in his sleep, and Will does not believe he remembers having done so upon waking. There are spikes of anger, hesitations, and very occasionally tears that lack context or apparent cause, and it has been difficult even for Will to understand exactly what sights and scents trigger these responses.

  
The pieces are always opaque and disjointed, the timeline scrambled. They resist a coherent narrative, and Will does not try to force them together. The truth may rest behind Hannibal’s few remaining walls, but is a knowledge that if breathed into the world might not be survivable for either of them. Will has no intention of breaching those walls.

When the two of them spot the neo-Nazis, though, Will knows instantly that there is something deeply personal about the hatred that they provoke in Hannibal, and that hatred is something far more visceral than his usual aesthetic offense at the tacky and brutish.

Almost immediately, the course that the rest of tonight will take becomes obvious, and Will braces himself to shepherd Hannibal though it, whether or not he is asked to do so.

**II.**

This is how it starts: the man with the swastika tattoo walks past their table, and Will’s spoon freezes on its trajectory to his bowl.

There is an instant in which he doubts what he saw. But he watches the man and his two friends as the slide onto bar stools, and when the man shrugs his motorcycle jacket off his shoulders against the heat of the Louisiana night, Will once again spots the top arm of the swastika inked on the back of his neck.

A sense of defensive shame comes first - a feeling of guilt by association at simply being in the same space as the man and his friends, of having been dirtied and having dirtied Hannibal by bringing him here. On the heels of that: anger at himself for this response, the selfish impotence of it.

It’s when he thinks again of Hannibal that the useless sense of indignation, which after all had persisted for only a handful of seconds, falls away and a more productive line of thought begins to take shape.

He looks across the table to Hannibal and sees that he’s missed nothing. There is an avidness in his eyes, a hunter’s focus. Eagerness and a violent sense of outrage spill off him in closely spaced alternating waves, and if there is also a vague taint of anxiety it is tucked neatly away in the back.

Will knows that he is the only one present who is sensitive to these things in Hannibal. The welter of his emotions would drag Will under if he hadn’t learned to enjoy swimming with the current, but no one else will have seen it. If the police come around to the roadhouse later no one will report a stranger seen staring daggers at the back of the victim’s head. If Hannibal is remembered at all it will only be in association with Will, and about him people will remember little more than the scar which disfigures the left side of his face.    

Will might have gotten the scar fixed while they were abroad, but he had decided against it. For a long time he hadn’t been able to manage mirrors, but he likes it now. He’s grown to appreciate the ease with which he can conceal himself behind it.

His mind is already made up about the men at the bar even before he reads the question in Hannibal’s eyes. It’s a welcome change, having a decision come so easily.

“I’ll get them for you,” Will tells Hannibal.

**III.**

Will is nearly etastic with the ease of the thing, and the promise of it.

It feels like having worms under his skin, mimicking and matching the neo-Nazis, saying what they hope he will say and laughing with their jokes. His accent, which came back almost as soon as he deboarded the plane, feels slimy in his mouth as he uses it to disarm them. It’s all somehow worse than any case file that he’s ever let roll around inside his head.

But it is also just _so easy_.

 _They want me as badly as I want them_ , he realizes very quickly, and he plays to that, feigns interest.

He expected to be more nervous. He expected to be met with suspicion. Perhaps, also, he expected some degree of guilt at what he was doing.

None of these things happen.

Twenty minutes and a round of drinks later - Will’s treat - he knows their names and their politics and the organizations that they work with. And he knows all sorts of things that they never meant to tell him, things that they don’t even realize they’ve told.

Hannibal is watching through the bar mirror with a faint fond smile that’s only for him. No one else here, Will knows, would even recognize it as a smile, let alone understand the weight of love and admiration behind it.

When plans are etched out and the tab paid, Will gets up from his stool and goes back to Hannibal.

“They think we’re their kind of folk,” Will says softly, pulling his chair back up to the table. “We’re going back to their place in a little bit. I let on that I’m looking to score meth, but mainly they think they can recruit me - and hopefully you, too. They’ll want to come over and chat with you for a bit before we leave. Don’t seem too sharp if you can help it.”

Hannibal’s smile is blatant and friendly as he angles it towards the three men on the bar stools so they can see it reflected in the mirror over the bar. “Wonderful,” he says.

After a moment he adds, “Finish eating. Don’t let them ruin this for you.” Will nods at the wisdom of that and picks up his spoon again.

In his bowl is the exact same seafood gumbo that he can remember eating nearly three decades earlier, when his father brought him to the roadhouse after work, spicy with andouille sausage. There have been nights when he’s dreamed of eating that gumbo again, and he tries to enjoy it as Hannibal advised, but he’s lost his taste for it.

Everything here is tainted now, but for the sake of avoiding attention he eats anyway.

**IV.**

In the rental car now, Will behind the wheel as they wait for the trio to pull out of the parking lot. A souped up Harley that’s probably elderly enough to be considered a classic and a new gun metal grey chevy silverado. “More money than taste,” Hannibal comments when he sees the truck.

“The one with the bike - that Merle? - he’s purely white trash,” Will says. “The other two are rich boys aping a dubious aesthetic. Poorly.”

“Which offends you more?”

“Dunno.” He doesn’t dwell on the question, moves on. “This is a good set up. We’re going to be way out in the boondocks.”

Will pulls out of the parking lot behind the truck.

“They don’t suspect?”

“Completely oblivious. For a second there I thought maybe they’d clocked us and were trying to see if they could get us to walk into a fag bashing, but it’s alright. They like me.” His face is still, untroubled. “They’re gonna to like me right up til they don’t.”

Will pauses again. “This is going to go real well.”

“It’s been a while,” Hannibal says. His voice is mild, but Will can hear him drumming his fingers on the arm rest. He’d been bouncing his leg under the table back at the roadhouse, until Will had nudged him to stop with his own shoe. Right now Hannibal reminds Will of nothing so much as a large puppy full of anticipation at being let out of its kennel.

Will is, absurdly, guilty. “I never asked you to stop for me,” he says softly.

“You didn’t. But I was happy to wait for you.”

Things had gotten bad for Will. They are better now, mostly, but for a long time they had been really bad.

Their first and only kill since the Dragon was everything that Will feared it would be, and afterwards the guilt and self-loathing had nearly eaten him alive.

He’d made a sincere and very nearly successful attempt at suicide. Afterwards, at least, he had been able to articulate his certainty that he could not survive himself as the person that Hannibal expected him to be.   

_What would you do if I told you I want to stop? If you love me, you’ll let me stop._

He’d been given space, and Will was not ignorant as to the cost of that gift. To retreat was wildly in conflict with Hannibal’s instincts, especially when he was so certain that the cure to Will’s problems lay in embracing the aspects of his nature that most reflected Hannibal’s own.

Things had started to get better a little while after that, and though he’d made another two attempts they had felt perfunctory - even half-assed - even to himself at the time. That had more to do with feeling that he _should_ feel like he deserved to be dead than actually actively wanting to die.

Sometimes when he picks up a knife the scars on the undersides of his wrists itch to be reopened, but he’s been feeling that itch one way or another for almost his entire life. By now, it was almost familiar enough to be comforting.

He was prepared to pretend polite disinterest in what Hannibal did when Will was not present, even to tolerate a desire on Hannibal’s part to discuss his kills, but nearly three years have passed since the bad night when Hannibal dragged Will against his will back into life, and Hannibal hasn’t taken anyone since. If it had been otherwise Will knows that he would know.

It’s been impossible for him to give Hannibal everything that he wanted for the two of them, at least not in the exact way that Hannibal had wanted it, but the two of them together are more than the hunt, and Will has almost given up fighting the knowledge that the thing between them is good and golden.

**V.**

Will’s father had drifted from boatyard to boatyard, never able to hold a job for long, dragging Will along with him as an afterthought. He and Hannibal have tried to retrace the path that the old man had taken all those years ago, as well as Will can recall it. There are large lacunae in his early memories and the landscape has conspired to erase much of what he can recall.    

They’ve found that most of the boatyards are closed now, decaying structures enclosed behind padlocked fences that were easy enough to open, or else so extensively remodeled that Will can barely be certain that he’s brought them to the right place. Of the secession of rusting tin roof shacks and travel trailers in which Will and his father had stayed almost nothing remained.

But before going to the roadhouse, Hannibal and Will had found one of the old places still standing. They’d cut through the kudzu vines which had engulfed it. Inside, it felt more like they had stepped into some humid maw than a place where people had once lived.

The mattress was still there on the floor, nothing more than rusted springs covered in moss and mold, and Will was able to show Hannibal the exact place where he had stood the night he took the box cutter from his father’s tool kit.

“It felt like I stood there for hours,” Will said, remembering the weight of the blade in his hand, the way the old man laid there blackout drunk in his own sick, his narrow chest going up and down, Will’s blood drying on his bruised knuckles. “But kids don’t have any sense of time. Maybe it was just a few minutes.”

“Why didn’t you do it?”

“Scared,” Will said. “And he was my Dad.”

Now, as they follow the big truck down a narrow back road that feels almost indistinguishable from the one they’d taken to find his old home, Will points at a tiny tin rectangle of a structure, briefly illuminated by the rental’s headlight. It’s much neater than the old shack had been. “You see that right there? Smoke house. People here slaughter their own animals and they smoke their own meats. We know how to survive without going to the Walmart.”

Will was surprised by how proud of that he felt now. After he left for school, there had been a long stretch of time when he wouldn’t have dreamed of telling anyone else something like that.  

“It’s not so different from where I grew up,” Hannibal says, and Will feels something closely akin to gratitude.

Maybe another five minutes pass in silence. Then up ahead the truck’s brake lights flash. It turns off onto a narrow gravel road, and Will follows.  

“Look at that,” Will says, taking in the big house at the end of the long drive. There’s nothing but green surrounding the house and its out buildings. “What did I tell you? Gift wrapped for us.” He feels at once extremely serious and nearly giddy. 

He doesn’t have to look at Hannibal to know that they are sharing the same smile.


	2. Chapter 2

**I.**

It had been an enduring source of bitterness and disgust for Will’s father that Will lacked a hunter’s constitution.

Will had a great talent tracking animals. He understood their desires and their fears intuitively, and could predict where they might be found and judge with great acuity just how close he could come without spooking them. And he was patient, which he knew was really the important thing. But nothing - not hunger or fear of punishment or pain - could coax him into taking a shot. His finger would freeze on the trigger and the barrel would jitter hopelessly in his shaking hands. 

He’d learned to fish instead, because that put food on the table but mostly because his father didn’t fish. People who claimed that fish didn’t feel the bite of the hook were deceiving themselves into a comfortable ignorant callousness, Will knew, but there wasn’t as much in the glassy flat fish eyes to claw at him as there was in warm blooded things.

He wasn’t a hunter but he knew the forests and the swamps.

He’d been walking in the woods one day, perhaps when he was fifteen, passing through the hardwood bottomland towards a lake that he had wanted to try out, when the powerful smell of rotting meat had caught him. He’d thought maybe he was close to a black bear’s cache, that he might see tracks or even the bear itself if he approached carefully, and he felt at once anticipation and unease at the idea. The bears weren’t really dangerous but they could be big and were protective of their food supply.

But it was like a compulsion, going forward, even though he knew it to be unwise. He wanted to see the predator.

There wasn’t any bear.

The buck had been gut shot. It was rotting from the inside but it was still alive, and Will came towards it with the same taunt slow rigidness with which he approached his father when he knew a beating was imminent.  

Will could see it breathing.

He hoped, distantly and desperately, that it would die before he got there.

“Please be dead,” he said, like a prayer, though he knew it wasn’t. At the sound of his voice its head twitched toward him. It couldn’t do more than that twitch, couldn’t lift its head, but its eyes moved to look at him. There was no bottom to what he saw there.

Will turned from it, sick inside of himself, walking stiffly away and then running, his vision blurry.

For a long time he couldn’t go back, and he tore at himself for being so cowardly, so uselessly immobilized by pain that wasn’t even his own, knowing that the deer’s pain was continuing on and on because he’d done nothing for it.  

When he went to find the deer again it felt like he was walking to his own death, but once he got there he was able to use the knife.

He didn’t get sick until after.

 **II.**  
The buck is large in his thoughts as they settle down in the neo-Nazis’ sitting room. He moves on autopilot. He is conscious that he is doing everything right, that all the niceties are observed, but he is barely there.

The memory of the deer bleeds into the trembling resignation he felt that last night in Hannibal’s kitchen, when he had felt not only cut but gutted, waiting as Hannibal clutched him close with the expectation that when Hannibal let him go - when their bodies were no longer pressed together - that his insides would spill out into his hands, and the numb horror of that waiting to come apart and everything that went after it blurs into the sharp terror he felt when he looked into the bullet wound that the Dragon had given Hannibal to try to see what might have been ruptured or ruined, thinking about sepsis and infections and remembering as he did so the smell of the dying buck.   

 _I'm dissociating,_ he thinks with a distant sense of worry, but that unease is dwarfed by the recollection of dithering in the car after he fled from the botched murder, the smell of his own vomit heavy in the closed space, watching Hannibal while he took his time cleaning up a mess that was at least half Will’s own making, thinking that it would already be over for the man they had snared if Will had been stronger - that it never would have even begun for him if Will had resisted himself - and the deer had been with him then, too, and when he’d gotten into the bath and opened his wrists like he’d opened the dying deer’s throat, leaning his head back and thinking about the stream as his body began to grow cold, and he is dissociating and something important has happened.  

He’s on his feet and his knife is in his hand and the blade is in one of the rich boys' belly. Kenny, he remembers, the one who sounded like he was from Omaha under the paper thin affected draw, and he pulls the knife out and sticks it in again and again and again and when Kenny goes down to his knees Will forgets about the knife and shoves Kenny backwards and falling on top of him Will pins Kenny’s arms underneath his knees so he can’t struggle and Will’s hands find his throat.

Will senses Hannibal’s eyes on him, watching him intently, but he can’t parse exactly what the other man is feeling in this moment. While Hannibal is watching this Merle comes at him from behind with a kitchen knife, and Hannibal twists sideways to dodge the blade and his hand reaches out and grasps the back of Merle’s neck. He drives Merle’s face into the kitchen counter and the man’s nose breaks and some of his teeth shatter. Hannibal lets him fall limply to the floor, and though all of this he never stops watching Will strangling Kenny.

Will sees very little of this himself, but Hannibal will tell him of it later. Right now his vision is tunnel-focused on Kenny’s face. He feels the hardness of the knife handle, its blade still buried inside of Kenny, press against his stomach. Blood is soaking his shirt.

When Will finally stands, Hannibal motions with his chin towards the other side of the room, where the third neo-Nazi is sitting against the wall with his hands wrapped around the blade of the cheap novelty sword that is sticking up from the center of his chest. Will sees that he’s cut his fingers on the blade - either trying to stop it going in or trying to pull it out.

They step toward him together. 

Will can’t remember what this one is called - he’s always been bad at retaining names - but he is remembering what happened now.

Hannibal had taken the sword, which was little more than a decorative toy, down from the wall and turned as though to ask a question about it. Something about the way that Hannibal was moving had that one suspicious, and Will had seen him stick his hand into his back pocket, where the outline of a gravity knife could be seen.

He hadn’t done anything to warn Hannibal - he knew that Hannibal would already know. Instead, he’d stood up and walked toward Kenny, friendly-like, and when from behind him Hannibal put the sword into the other man Will saw it happen in Kenny’s face. By then Will’s own knife was already in his hand, and then it was off to the races.

Cheap though it was, Will could see that the sword had gone in deep enough to do its job, though certainly Hannibal had placed a great deal of power behind his thrust. Now, when Hannibal tries to twist the blade and pull it free, the hilt comes off in his hand.

Hannibal scoffs at the poor workmanship. “Did you buy this at the mall?” he asks, but the neo-Nazi is busy with dying and doesn’t answer him.  

“God, this is pathetic,” Will says, with a sort of wonderment. He hadn’t expected all that much but somehow he’d thought that they would at least be a _little_ dangerous.

Will can’t quite remember where Merle had been when it all started. He’s down now, in any case, but when they moved to tie him up he comes around quick enough to get an arm free to sucker punch Will across the nose.

“You’re a tough old boy,” Will leans in and tells him. “No one can say you weren’t.” Merle jerks his head back and spits in Will’s face.

Will wipes it away with the back of his hand. His smile is soft. “I ain’t even fussed,” he says calmly.

Hannibal is strumming with a new layer of disgusted outrage, and Will knows that’s what's going to count for old Merle.Will doesn't need to be angry.

Hannibal’s found a rag somewhere. He leans over the man and shoves it, roughly, into Merle’s mouth. Will can see the way it pushes against his busted teeth, hurting him.

He had expected to be allowed to just sit back and watch. Instead, Hannibal holds a scalpel out to Will, handle first.

“I got him for you,” Will says, waving the blade away. “I said before.”

  
“Give me another present, Will, please. Let me watch you work.”

Will wets his lips, waffling. It's hard for him not to give Hannibal what he wants, insomuch as he can. “Let me go and check outside to make sure we can get away with as much as I think. I’d like to take the gag out. Would need to, honestly.”  

The only living thing in the outbuildings is a barn cat that bolts when Will tries to call it over. There’s a bag of cheap kibble in one of the cupboards and Will drags it out and slices it open, hoping that the mice and raccoons won’t get it all before someone comes around again to feed the cat.

There's a wide selection of tools hanging on the wall of one of the sheds. Will considers them for a minute before deciding that he doesn’t want them.

There’s nothing else for him to do now except go back inside. He looks out toward the drive. The keys are in his pocket, and the rental is right there...

He snorts, shakes his head at the thought before it grows any sillier.

The part of him that contemplates bolting is a fiction, and he knows it. The ambivalence is a lie manufactured to make him feel better about what he is about to do, as though not being fully invested in it offers some sort of absolution. That voice has gotten him into trouble before, and he recognizes it as his enemy.

 **III.**  
“There’s no one else,” Will means to tell Hannibal when he comes back inside, but before he can speak he sees that this is not strictly true.

Hannibal’s been busy while Will was inside. He’d found another one, fast asleep in his bed. Will resents anyone who sleeps that deeply. He’s still groggy now, probably halfway stoned on one thing or another.

This one is younger than the others had been, maybe twenty-five and he isn’t wearing anything other than a worn pair of pajama bottoms. There’s a swastika tattoo on his the right side of his clavicle, smaller and cruder than the one that Will had spotted on the back of Merle’s neck which had set all of this in motion.    

He’s seen the bodies of his friends and he can feel the zip-ties cuffing his hands behind his back but he hasn’t started to really understand what it all means for himself. Maybe that’s what wakes the _really_ ugly thing in Will, the thing that slept on while he was laying this trap and hardly stirred even when his hands were around Kenny’s throat.

He wants to make sure the miserable little Nazi _understands_.

He changes the plan abruptly. “One for you, one for me,” he tells Hannibal. “And I want that one.”

 “I’d rather we work together. The situation is ripe with possibilities.” The hurt isn't easy to catch, but it's there. 

“I know, but just this once, okay? I want to try something my own way.”

The implicit promise sways Hannibal, as Will knew it would.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This got pretty heavy. Please mind the tags.

Will remembers what it had been like when he first left for school. He’d fit in no better at the university than he had in the boatyards - too strange, too sensitive, too much and not enough a part of everything that happened around him. His voice invited comment at the same time it marked him as the white trash that he didn’t want to be anymore. He’d choked on his own accent for a week, then he’d deliberately set out to kill it.

It lives again now, stronger than ever. He leans on his r’s as he speaks. His voice is slow, easy.

“What’s your name?”

“B-billy.”

He take Billy by the shoulder and leads him into the rec room that Hannibal had found while searching the house. Hannibal is behind him, carrying Merle over his shoulder like a sack of feed, and he takes Merle to the far side of the room, where a punching bag is hanging from a hook in the ceiling, and sets him down on his back. The man is already handcuffed and feet are tied together, so it is a short piece of work for Hannibal to draw his wrists against his ankles and knot them together. He leaves Merle like a turtle stuck on its back and goes over to investigate the hook from which the punching bag is hanging.

Will is gentler. He leads Billy over to couch, pushed him backwards onto it. Not hard - just hard enough to make him sit.

It’s six steps from the couch to the card table in the corner, and Will takes them, not hurrying. He comes back with one of the folding chairs and sits down across from Billy.

“You think about running while I was gone just now?”

Billy didn’t answer, but Will could see that he had thought about it - was bitterly angry at himself for not thinking about it sooner.   

He ties Billy’s ankles together, and then he runs the rope up to Billy’s cuffed wrists and knots it with enough slack for Billy to be able to sit up as long as he leans forward.

“That’s an interesting tattoo you have there, Billy,” Will says when he’s done. He stretches his arm out and flicks the inked skin with the the nail of his index finger. “Where’d you get that - you get that in prison?”

“Yeah man, but you gotta, you know? You get eaten alive in there if you don’t stick with your folks.”

The noise Hannibal makes is too dignified to be called a snort, but there’s a more than passing resemblance. That sound catches Will and grows in his throat into something that’s embarrassingly close to a giggle. He can’t resist turning his head to share a smile full of incredulous delight with Hannibal.

Billy is watching him, wanting to know why Will’s laughing but not daring to ask. “Sure,” Will says, returning to the thread of their discussion. “Sure. That’s just how it is exactly. You didn’t want that ugly old swastika on your chest, but you had to. You were forced into it.”

“Right! Yeah!” Billy says eagerly. Then he rushes on, whispering now as though there’s some sort of confidence between the two of them. “What’s that guy doing?”

Billy was facing Hannibal, but Will has to turn his head to look. Hannibal’s taken the punching bag off the swiveling screw lock hook that it was hanging from and is wrestling Merle up to his feet. Will’s starting to get an idea, but he doesn’t bother answering.

“Prison’s real rough, I know it,” he says instead. It’s a gross oversimplification of what happened that he offers Billy, but none of this is the truth that Will is interested in seeing Billy grasp, so it doesn’t matter. “I was inside for a little while myself there. Well, not prison exactly. Hospital for the criminally insane, that’s where I was. They let me out after a little bit - couldn’t get the charges to stick - but my friend over there? They'd have never let him go. He broke out - we killed a lot of guards to make it happen, lot of cops.”

Will had choked on those deaths for a long time, all those large competent men that got up that morning and went to work with less awareness of what was coming for them than lambs lead to slaughter, all to make the plan work. To get Hannibal and himself right where they are now, here in this moment.

All of that is distant in Will’s mind now, though, and he’s more invested in watching how the gears are turning in Billy’s head. He doesn’t want him to work it out yet.

Behind him, there’s a new volley of muffled indignant shouting, and Will turns again to look. The hook in the ceiling isn’t high enough to pull Merle off his feet, but Hannibal has looped the handcuffed over the hook and closed the screw lock so it can’t slip off. He’s stuck there, arms above his head, unsteady with his feet tied together.

The old fascist is outraged, Will supposes, because Hannibal is cutting away his clothing. The inked skin underneath is like an illustrated guide to the iconography of white supremacy.

There’s a timing to this. Will turns back to Billy. “I’ve got another question for you, Billy. You said that you had to get that shitty little tattoo to keep yourself safe, and I believe you,” he says, not believing it for a minute. Will has not been inside Billy’s room but it’s easy to guess what it looks like.  “But you made you put that flag up in your room, Billy? Who’s making you keep those books on your shelves?”

He lies quickly but not especially well. “That shit ain't mine. I swear.” His eyes leave Will’s, grow rounder as they watch what’s happening on the other side of the room.

Hannibal is using the scalpel on Merle and Merle is screaming. Will turns and watches Hannibal make the long, shallow incisions in Merle’s skin. The straight line starting at the base of the throat and extending down the center of the chest down to the groin. Hannibal returns the blade to its starting point and slices perpendicular across his shoulders, detouring in its progress only to curve around the tattoos. He reaches up and cuts a red bracelet around Merle’s wrist, just below the cuffs, then extents the line down his arm to meet the one at the edge of the shoulder.  

Anyone who knows anything about hunting or trapping can see the reasoning. Will understands what it’s about, and he thinks Merle does too.

The screaming goes on for a long time. When it gets weak enough that Will can be heard without shouting, he asks Billy, “That your buddy over there?”

He can tell that Billy is trying to decide how he should answer.

Will offers him some alternatives. “Your boss, your mentor, your dealer? He your daddy, Billy?”

Billy shakes his head empathically. “Nah man, I don't even know him.”

“Anyone ever tell you that you’re a bad liar, Billy?”

He see the hope light up in his eyes, the base cunning that goes with it, and knows that the boy still has no real concept of what he’s up against. “Yeah, my Mama says that to me sometimes,” he says.

It’s accepted wisdom, Will knows, that the best thing you can do if your snatched up is to try to humanize yourself in the eyes of your captor. But Will is under no illusions in regards to the humanness of others, and the clumsy play for empathy offends him. If Billy knew what was good for him he would try to distance himself from Will emotionally rather than seeking to intrude further.

And too; mothers are a sore topic for Will.

Billy forges on. “She's old, man, she needs me to -”

“You keep on lying to me, what’s happening to your buddy is going to look like a walk in the park next to what I do to you.”

“He isn’t -. Don’t. Stop.”

“Stop what? I haven’t even laid hands on you yet.” Will gives him a little bit of time. Then he says, “I’m getting real sick of looking at that tattoo. If I give you this knife, will you take it off for me?”

And Billy says, “What.”

“You heard me. If you do that, maybe I’ll let you go.”

“How the -”

Merle starts screaming again. Will doesn’t turn around; it’s more interesting to watch what’s happening filtered through Billy’s eyes, but he calls out to Hannibal, “Hun, I’m trying to have a conversation here.”

“I only took the gag out because you asked me to, Will,” comes the reply. He’s a little breathless - Merle has a lot of wiggle room on his chain and is giving him a bit of a work out, but Will doubts Hannibal minds.

Will can see how much Billy doesn’t like the fact that Hannibal’s dropped Will name into the conversation. He’s starting to get it now, all those little hopes and maybes drifting away like cottonwood seeds.

That would be why Hannibal said it, of course. Will can’t decide if he resents the assistance or not, but he rolls with it. “That was before Billy decided to grace us with his presence, Hannibal. I don’t care one way or the other about that anymore.”

 _Hannibal_ , Billy mouths. And then a little louder: “Oh sweet Jesus.”

“Oh good - you watch the news,” Will says. His tone is conspiratory, that of someone letting slip the contents of a birthday present before the party. “He’s going to eat you, once we’re good and done here. I might help him. I haven’t decided yet.”

“Jesus.”

“What you thinking about making, Hannibal?”

“Tenderloin with fresh rosemary and kalamata olives,” Hannibal says promptly. “And a spring salad of fava beans and fennel topped with pecorino, I think.”

“Where in God’s name do you think you are going to find half of that out here?” he gripes, turning his chair to face Hannibal. He sees something he doesn’t expect when he glances at Merle; Hannibal has been cutting careful outlines around each of his many tattoos. The man isn’t exactly unconscious but he’s fuzzy in the eyes. “We’d be lucky to find a Winn Dixie within twenty miles of here.”

Will turns back around rolls his eyes dramatically for Billy’s edification. “I love the crazy sonofabitch, but sometimes he’s just unreasonable,” Will tells Billy conversationally, before turning back to Hannibal.

“A gumbo,” he suggests.

“You’ve only just had that,” Hannibal returns. “I believe you’ve had that three times this week.”

“I like gumbo.”

“I don’t care for okra. The texture is slimy.”

“I can make it without okra.”

“Will.”

“Ponce, then - stomach stuffed with sausage, peppers, onion and rice. With a red wine roux. Would that suit you?”

“Yes,” Hannibal says, his voice thoughtful. “That would do nicely.”

Will turns back to Billy. He leans forward on the folding chair, his arms draped over his knees. “Let’s get back to the point,” Will says. “What are we going to do about that tattoo?”

“Are you going to take off the tattoos, Will?” Hannibal chimes in. “My thought was to remove everything but.”

Will doesn’t turn to look at Hannibal before replying this time. If he is honest with himself, there is something in the droop of Merle’s shaggy head that troubles him. Will doesn’t beat himself up about that; he knows he can’t help it. “Yours has more ink than mine does,” answers.

“Granted.”

“What type of picture you painting?”

“This individual has chosen to define himself with fascist iconography. In doing so, he’s surrendered all right to be defined by anything but that iconography. He has forfeited therefore everything that marks him as an individual as well as the right to any barriers between himself and the consequences of his political affiliations. And also - it’s a demonstration of just how little protection the symbols of that ideology offer their barrier.”    

“That’s good,” Will says. “Your work isn’t usually that overtly political, though.”

“All art is inherently political, Will, especially given the times in which we live.

“And I nearly forgot - I have something for you.” He hears Hannibal walking towards him and turns halfway around to meet him. “Look what I found in young Billy’s dresser.” Hannibal hands Will the pictures.

Sometimes it strikes Will as almost funny, that he still retains such a capacity for moral outrage. He is reminded now, too, that he has not lost his the ability to feel disgust and shock.

He’s explored in intimate detail at least two dozen fresh crime scenes, has looked at perhaps thousands of photographs of death and blood and brutality over the course of his career. Hell - he’s played his part in creating tableaus that likely sent the trainees scampering to switch their majors and in making messes that would haunt the veterans into their graves.

This is about as bad as anything he’d ever seen.

 He knows, because he has read descriptions in the literature, that he is looking at the aftermath of a boot party. Nothing remains of the ruined mass of a person that might allow Will to identify their race or gender. He is sick down into the marrow of his bones, but there is also a sort of gratitude which sits uneasily in him because he suspects that it is somehow low and exploitive, but that he clings to nonetheless because now he is certain that he will be okay after tonight.

It won’t be like the others. He’ll have no problem living with this. He’s grateful to know that.

But things will not go the way that he wishes them to go if he looks at Billy now.  

He turns and watches Hannibal work instead.

The ripping away of the skin is something that he feels on his own body, the tugging along the lines that Hannibal has cut and the sudden agonizing exposure of that which was not meant to be exposed, but he feels it and he allows it move on past him. The pain does not belong to him and he has no intention of holding onto it.

He focuses instead on mirroring Hannibal’s affective state, on mapping every shade of feeling that animates tonight’s particular flavor of violence. Will knows that for all of the closeness that they share they are, at the core, very different kinds of monsters, and neither entirely comprehensible to the other. But he can come close. He can see and he can draw it into himself, at least for a little while.

When he feels calm in the way that Hannibal is calm, he turns back to Billy.

His eyes are closed, but when Will tells him to open them he does.

Billy’s apt to buck and scream and struggle against his binds even more wildly than is Merle, who by now is winding down and looking about ready to check out, but when he starts to go to pieces Will puts a hand on his shoulder to calm him. He is so desperate to believe that the gentleness of that touch will make a difference for him that he forces himself to be still.    

Will talks to him, softly, tells him how it will be for him, exactly how he is going to hurt him and why, and the picture that he paints is one of slow agony that goes on and on and on.

Watching the understanding grow and spread in Billy’s face like flowers coming into bloom is delicious. _This is my meat,_ he thinks. _This is what will nourish me, from here on out._ It scares him, but only distantly. Only a little.

Merle is dead now. Hannibal has silenced him so that he will miss nothing of what Will has to tell Billy.

At some point Billy remembers Will’s offer of the knife and begs to be allowed to have it. Will, who never meant it anyway, shakes his head sadly and tells him that ship has sailed.

“There’s a hazy sense of calm that comes when you feel your life blood leaving you,” he tells Billy. “You go wandering in your head and you find things there. It can be nice, like floating in chilly water. I promise that I’ll give that to you, Billy. Eventually.” It’s a fond thought, underpinned by kindness.  

When Hannibal tells him that he’s finished his own project, Will sighs like a man about to begin a long but not entirely unrewarding piece of work. “Our turn now,” he says to Billy.

Billy begins to screech, incoherently, and jackknifes his body, struggling madly against his binds, and for the first time Will hurts him.

He strikes him across the face, hard, and Billy becomes meek and still. He starts to cry, but quietly, like someone who has always known that crying won’t get him anything.

Will recognizes that kind of crying.

He places a hand on Billy’s chest. It’s easy to find exactly where his heart is, it’s pounding so hard. There isn’t much meat on him, so it’s nearly as simple to find the space between the ribs. With his left hand marks his place with a fingertip and with the right he takes out his knife and unfolds it.

Under his fingertip he can feel Billy’s heart speed up, but it is a hopeful fluttering now, like a bird that’s seen a chance to escape its cage. He looks at Billy, cocking his head slightly as he regards him, and Will sees the hope growing there despite himself, the hope and the pleading and the fear that this will be a trick.  

When Will puts the tip of the knife right next to where his fingertip had been there is a sharp intake of breath. Wrapping both hands around the hilt, Will pushes down. Hard.

The blood comes fast when Will takes the knife out, but the dying takes a few minutes. Billy tries to grasp his hand and Will pulls away, disgusted.

He watches Billy’s face, looking to see if he sees, if he understands that Will told the truth about the stream. He can’t be sure one way or the other. It doesn't matter very much.

Hannibal has been behind him for a long time now. Will feels cold, as he did when he cut himself and when Hannibal cut him, and he would like to be a part of the heat that his radiating off of Hannibal.

“Put your arms around me,” Will says. “Please.” Hannibal does.

His voice comes low from directly behind Will’s ear. “That was abrupt.” .

“I got what I needed,” Will answers. “Be happy with me."

"I am," Hannibal says, and the kiss falls on the crown of his head, in among the curls. 


	4. Chapter 4

Billy goes into the bayou, piece by piece.

Will stopped the stolen airboat when he began to see a lot of scrape marks along the bank, signs that gators liked to slide in and out of the water here. If any part of Billy is ever found, no one will pause to wonder what became of the missing pieces.

Will takes up the ruptured heart last of all. He lowers it into the black water gently, watching as it sinks into the darkness, and he remembers the way it fluttered under his hand, how it strained, longing, towards the quick release of his knife.

Hannibal balked at turning over an object of such significance to the turtles and catfish, of course, but that wasn’t his choice to make.

They’d left Hannibal’s own project in the front lawn, arms cuffed over a tree branch to hold it upright, then they had burned the house.

“It’s like a machine, all this green,” Will says, trailing his fingers through the water though he knows what a risk that is, especially when the scent of blood is so strong in the air and the water. “It eats and eats and everything that it eats is rendered insignificant beyond the slight measure of fuel that it provides to the thing that ate it, which will probably be eaten by something else the next day anyway. Nature has no mercy and no sense of aesthetics.”

“Was it mercy, Will, that you gave that miserable little Nazi?”

He can’t tell if it is irony or disapproval in Hannibal’s voice, but in any case Will is too lost in his own sense of wonderment to feel troubled. He wonders distantly when he stopped worrying that he’d pay in blood if he made Hannibal angry, when the sick panic of fight or flight that was provoked by the idea of Hannibal’s anger faded simply to unhappiness at the idea of Hannibal not being entirely happy with him. He doesn’t know when that changed - thinks maybe was years ago - but he’s glad for it. It’s easy, in the here and now, to admit to himself how good things have been.

Instead of answering, he says, “Did you see the way he watched me? Everything in his universe narrowed down to trying to see me - seeing me well enough to find some thread that he could jerk hard enough to make me let him go.”

“As such efforts go, his were especially clumsy and desperate.”

“true,” Will agrees, voice dreamy and distant even to his own ears. They have been awake now for at least forty hours, and many of those hours have been spent at hard work. He knows that there have been times that he’d been more weary than he is now, but that fact doesn’t detract from the weight of his limbs or the fuzziness of his thoughts. It’s alright, though. It’s a satisfied kind of tired. “But the way… Did you see it? The way, even with everything I told him - even with everything that he knew about us, the moment he heard your name - he still wanted so badly to believe that if I understood him then I would be kind… The way he just broke to pieces when he finally saw that he wasn’t going to change my mind.”

“I did see,” Hannibal says, and the lines of his face are soft and fond as he thinks of it.

“You liked it,” he says, feeling absurdly coy. He knows that he is blushing.

“I did,” Hannibal says again. “But I confess to feeling cheated. I don’t understand why you did that. Had you followed through on what you promised him, _that_ would have been a masterful work.”    

“He would have stopped seeing me if I’d done that. He’d only have seen the knife and what was being done to him.”

“You’d be surprised how focused some of them can be.” He does not remind Will of the man on the beach, how it was Will who he tried to bargain with, though it had been Will who used the knife on him. He understands better now the mistake he made in cutting off his lines of communication to Will, why the excitement turned so quickly to disgust after Hannibal had taken the man’s eyes and tongue. His intention was to make it easier for Will to make it through, but he hadn’t realized at the time how important it would be for Will to be able talk to them and to see and be seen. These things are often pleasurable for Hannibal, but he does not _need_ them the way that Will does.

Will shrugs easily. “I’m open to being proven wrong. But let me feel my own way through this, yeah?”

He sees the cracks in Hannibal now, more clearly than ever now, poorly executed kintsugi. Beams of light from the rising sun shot through the gaps, filtered green by the trees and the water. The pressure points are obvious, and he sees what little it would take to pull Hannibal, coaxing gently, to pieces.

It would not take half an hour, as it had with Billy, to reduce Hannibal to the least of his parts, nor would he require a background chorus of a friend dying by slow inches to teach him to welcome the knife when it cut deep and cut deadly.  

He could do it, Will thinks, with ten words. Maybe as few as four. Hell, he thinks, he could do it without speaking at all; even knowing all that he does it is sometimes hard for Will to credit the idea that when he cuts himself, Hannibal bleeds too.

It is a type of control that he has always fought to prevent others from having over him, usually unsuccessfully, and it is mystifying to find himself in command of such a power over Hannibal’s heart.

It provokes in him an almost intolerable weight of tenderness, and before he speaks again he reaches out and takes one of Hannibal’s hands in his own. The touch is sticky with drying blood. “You’re so impatient,” he says fondly. “You’d have gotten me sooner in the long run if you’d given me more time to work things out myself.”

He feels the choking sense of alienation in the face of the place that made him, which has hung over him since their plane landed, begin to lift when he looks at Hannibal, and understands that wherever they go next he will be at home. 

**Author's Note:**

> Among other research sources, I drew on Katelyn Sunshine's Youtube video [Louisiana Cajun/Creole accent, dialect, customs,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeR7Ljv_tPc) including using what she says about smokehouses as dialogue for Will.
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> [Come visit on tumblr!](http://pragneto.tumblr.com)


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